V. S. Naipaul Book Quotations

I will say I am the sum of my books.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.